3.5-Term Pathway - Foundation Certificate in Humanities - Continue to Integrated Masters - Master of Letters (MLitSt) (Honours) - Creative Writing

In this course students will hone their creative and writing skills across a wide variety of genres from fiction and poetry to non-fiction, psycho-geography, script and performance writing – and beyond.

At the University of Essex they offer an unusual approach to the practice of writing, combing innovative and traditional methods in order to help students develop their writing skills and the abilities to judge their work, and that of others, critically. Learn how to give and receive feedback, through workshopping and development processes. Students are encouraged to step outside their comfort zone and discover new and different approaches to verbal art.

On the four-year MLitSt Creative Writing, students will be part of an interdisciplinary department and well-established home to practising poets, dramatists, novelists and critics. In the students fourth year, as post-graduate students, they will be able to choose from the following masters level creative writing topics: development of a novel plan, experimental language play, psychogeography, and poetic practice from the performative to the visual. 

Essex has nurtured a long tradition of distinguished writers whose work has shaped literature as it is known today, from past giants such as the American poets Robert Lowell and Ted Berrigan, to contemporary writers such as mythographer and novelist Dame Marina Warner, and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri. The course offers a varied, flexible and distinctive curriculum, focused on developing students abilities as writers, while allowing them to take options from the other courses within the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies including literature, filmmaking, journalism and drama.

Many of University of Essex's students have gone on to successfully publish their work, notable recent alumni include: Ida Lokas, Alexia Casale, Elaine Ewart, Patricia Borlenghi, and Simon Everett. A number of the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies graduates have gone on to undertake successful careers as writers, and others are now established as scholars, university lecturers, teachers, publishers, publishers’ editors, journalists, arts administrators, theatre artistic directors, drama advisers, and translators.